Re: [Paddlewise] Keeping kayak club members in touch.

I don't want to have this get too far off-topic, so I'll try to be brief.

> Don't use Topica.  The Ottawa area SK group used (uses?) it but I find it 
> clunky and its messages often get filtered out as Spam.  (Topica used to be 
> a spammers haven.)

There's no "used to" about it: Topica IS a major spam factory, becoming
more so every day, and thus is having all its outbound mail blocked in a
LOT of places.  It's so bad that on some networks their entire allocated
IP space is blocked in the routers/firewalls.

See:

	http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=topica&btnG=Google+Search&meta=group%3Dnews.admin.net-abuse.email

where you will find nearly 4000 messages discussing Topica -- and that's
just one forum.

> I wouldn't recommend Majordomo for a mailing list manager.  I've used
> the Lyris mailing list manager and would probably recommend that over Majordomo.

Majordomo-1 is admittedly getting rather outdated, which is why lots of
people are shifting to majordomo-2.  However, majordomo-1 is still eminently
serviceable for many lists, and it does have the advantage of being very
small and lightweight.

However, an excellent alternative is mailman, (http://www.list.org/) which 
is rapidly growing in popularity, has a nifty web interface for list-owners
and moderators, built-in archiving (or hooks to external archives), and lots
of other nice features. The only downside to mailman (from my point of view)
is that it's written in Python (instead of Perl or C or something more widely
used) and that it's somewhat of a CPU hog.


Finally, let me suggest to anybody who wants to research Topica, or Yahoo,
or anybody else vis-a-vis their spammy nature (or lack thereof) that a
number of excellent online resources exist for this: enormous amounts of
data have been compiled (in different ways by different people) and most
of these compilations are very easy to search.  Whether you want to slog
through the thousands of results is up to you, but I'll suggest that if
there ARE thousands of results, the first several dozen of which are
depressingly similar, that maaaaaaaybe that alone should tell you something.

I've started doing this as a matter of course before transacting business
with anyone online.  It's why, for example, I do not do business with
amazon.com and do lots of business with powells.com.

	Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email ("nanae")
	http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&group=news.admin.net-abuse.email

	Usenet news.admin.net-abuse.sightings ("nanas")
	http://groups.google.com/groups?safe=off&group=news.admin.net-abuse.sightings

	SpamHaus Register of Known Spam Operations ("ROKSO")
	http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/

	Clueless Mailers Spamdemic Research Center
	http://cluelessmailers.org/

	rfc-ignorant.org - The home for domains who don't play by the rules
	http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/

	The Story of "Nadine" -- a Tale of Mailing Lists
	http://www.honet.com/Nadine/

	Why don't spam blocking lists block only the spammers?
	http://www.clifto.com/itemize.html

	Thank Spammers
	http://www.linxnet.com/misc/spam/thank_spammers.html

	SpamFAQ
	http://www.spamfaq.net/

---Rsk
***************************************************************************
PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed
here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire
responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author.
Submissions:     PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net
Subscriptions:   PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net
Website:         http://www.paddlewise.net/
***************************************************************************